Search This Blog

Review: Green Darkness, by Anya Seton

In my opinion, Green Darkness wasn't quite as good as Katherine. It started off slow, and didn't pick up until the time travel back to the 16th century. But Anya Seton's command of the period of which she writes is commendable.

Celia Marsdon is an American who marries a member of the English aristocracy. Richard Marsdon lives in an area of England which is quite charming to Celia and her family members- manor houses complete with medieval-period ghosts are just one of the attractions that England holds for them. When she visits one of the medieval manors one day, Celia gets the odd sensation that she's been there before. A mystic named Akananda, a friend of the family, says that he feels as though he has met Celia and her mother in a past life- bringing to mind the idea of reincarnation, which is, or course, the whole theme of the book. He believes that Celia must relieve her past in order to make sense of the life she currently leads. It soon becomes quite clear that Celia's marriage is in trouble- Richard becomes more and more withdrawn, and Celia finds herself unable to handle changes. A visit back to the mid-16th century, when Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth were monarchs, is the highlight of this book. At this period in time, the Marsdon family is still Catholic (which it would be until the 18th century), despite the fact that two of the above monarchs were Protestant. As you can imagine, this will create great tension as Anya Seton captures the struggles the Marsdon family will go through.

This is a well-written book, although it does have its flaws, such as speech patterns. Even back in 1968, I imagine that Americans wouldn't have said things like, "I feel sort of queer," "How frightfully intellectual you're getting," and "I shouldn't want to live here, give me a convenient flat [as opposed to `apartment'] in Eaton Square every time," just to name a few. It seems that, although Anya Seton lived in Connecticut for a while, she completely ignored American slang. Anyways, that's a minor point; its neither here nor there. In sum, I liked this book for its clear, straightforward prose, and likeable characters. I also recommend reading Katherine, if you haven't already.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pages: 972Originally published: 1944My edition: 2000 (Chicago Review Press)How I acquired my copy: Amazon.com, 2004Forever Amber takes place in the 1660s, immediately follwing Charles II's ("the Merry Monarch") return of the Stuarts to the English throne. The book features Amber St. Claire, a young woman who starts out as a sixteen-year-old country girl, naieve to the workings of the world. She immediately meets Bruce Carlton, a dashing young Cavalier, with whom she has a passionate love affair in choppy intervals throughout the book. They have two children together, but Bruce won't marry her for the reason he tells his friend Lord Almsbury: that Amber just isn't the kind of woman one marries.

Upon following Bruce to London, he goes to Virginia, leaving her to fend for herself. What follows is a series of affairs and four marriages, with Bruce coming back from America now and then. Amber's marriages are imprudent: her first husband is a gambler, her second is…

Pages: 667Original date of publication: 2011My copy: 2011
(Oxford University Press)Why I decided to read:How I acquired my copy: Amazon.com, April 2013
This is a compilation of many of Jane Austen’s letters,
most of them sent to her sister Cassandra between 1796 and 1817, the year of
her death. Although many of Austen’s letters were destroyed by her sister in
order to preserve the family reputation, the collection contains over 160
letters in which Austen gives her sister details about her life in Chawton—as well
as giving us a tantalizing glimpse of what was going through her mind as she
was writing her novels (especially the novel that was to become Pride and
Prejudice, First Impressions). There are other letters here, too, giving advice
to her niece and professional correspondence to publishers—as well as a couple
of letters that were written by Cassandra Austen after Jane’s death.
To the sisters, the letters acted in the way that phone
calls do today; Austen’s news is all about pe…

Pages: 259Original date of publication: 2013My copy: 2013 (Penguin)Why I decided to read:How I acquired my copy: Phoenix bookstore, May 2013
In January 1937, the body of a young British girl, Pamela
Werner, was found near Peking’s Fox Tower. Although two detectives, one British
and the other Chinese, spent months on the case, the case was never solved
completely, and the case was forgotten in the wake of the invasion of the
Japanese. Frustrated, Pamela’s father, a former diplomat, tried to solve the crime.
His investigation took him into the underbelly of Peking society and uncovered
a secret that was worse than anything he could have imagined.
At first, I thought that this would be a pretty
straightforward retelling of a true crime, but what Paul French (who spent
seven years researching the story) reveals in this book is much more than that.
Foreign society in Peking in the 1930s was stratified, with the British
colonials at the top and the White Russian refugees at the bottom, but…